The purpose of a room is what we call it. That is in and of itself an intention. The name of the room is intended use. But our intentions also change what the room is and means to us in context of events. Thus, when we are missing something, the living room becomes the scene of a search, or we can even say it becomes the search itself. Our intention frames it so in our minds. That is also true (or should we say more precisely it is what happens?) with ideas.
Our intentions and emotions change things, places, persons, and ideas, and what they mean in context. The change includes what we call them. Although this all may seem obvious, consider how little attention we give to it as we are whisking our way through the events and leaving no object undisturbed as we search for our misplaced keys in what was only a short time before the living room.
What occurs in the brain as we move through these transfigurations of things and concepts is something else. Those who know more about these matters than I do may be sitting very smugly in a comfortable living and emotional space picturing the churning parts of the brain reacting. More likely they have a nice little mechanical set of images or associations akin to “This is your brain; this is your brain reading K’s post.” Hopefully it is not a hamster running endlessly if happily on a wheel.
With any luck and little patience, we may get to the brain at some point, although not likely in this post.
“Necessity is the mother of invention” has a nice ring to it but it is imprecise. Intention is also certainly not the mother. Desire may be the father. The paternity test results are still out on that. But the mother, poor innocent dear, seems to be imagination. Invention happens in the mind, in the womb of the brain, in what can only be described as the faculty of imagination and hypotheses.
How the elements get there for assembly is also a subject for further review. I may not be the only person who enjoyed reading Hume and the way he worked methodically through faculties of human sense, perception, thought, etc., but still has trouble with Kant’s ambling to the extent that I can say if I had to take a walk with that man, we never would have made it home and his keys would still be lost somewhere in the living room to this very day. To get where we are going here, we can forgo the links from the senses, perception, and learning for now.
We say we conceive in our minds which is true, as it is true to say the living room we search is inside our home. But the faculty where desire, intention, and the plan of action come together is imagination, when we are talking about invention. Necessity never was its biological mother, perhaps adoptive, but more like its babysitter. Simple actions are something else entirely and closer to the brain functions. We may like to believe as Inspector Clouseau declared with great conviction and comedic effect, “Everything I do is carefully planned!” But the evidence in the living room and in the science seems to show the opposite: Often we act or decide without conscious intent and afterwards rationalize or tell ourselves and others a story of why. In a very real sense, we re-imagine what happened. That is also true with memory, which brain evidence shows activates the same areas of the brain as imagination.
Likewise, historically necessity would have never given birth to any human invention. No self-respecting crow would declare a need to do the creative things crows are known to do. A crow does not need to do creative things such as put pebbles in a jug to raise the water level for ready beak access. No chimpanzee ever needed an automobile. If you don’t believe the crow, let’s phone and ask a reliable chimp.
Hello? Lance Link, Secret Chimp, please. Speaking? Mr. Link, K. here from Facebook. Did you ever need an automobile? No. It was just a job? What did it pay? That sounds pretty good. Uh-huh. Your cousin got a better deal? What did he do? The minky in the Clouseau movie? Yeah, I remember: He didn’t tell the blind guy what music to play and he got to do what he wanted with the money. “Chimp change”? Yeah, I get it. Sure. So, what happened with your career? You got old and didn’t feel like taking direction anymore. Yes, I did know that about chimpanzees. Even if it isn’t exactly accurate, I know everything you know and will ever know because you are entirely in my imagination. Good-bye now.
Fortunately, this is about more than me trying to be amusing. Otherwise, we’d be better off hanging out with our hominid ancestor homies. But before we let ourselves travel imaginatively back to that time and suffer the sticks and stones of outrageous fancy, to say nothing of the dating possibilities (and we’re not talking carbon method here, baby), let’s go back and find our keys and take a walk to change our state of mind.
I Dwell In Possibility 